Network and networked learning theories can be traced back into the 19th Century, when commentators were considering the social implications of networked infrastructure such as the
railways and the
telegraph. More recently, networked learning has its roots in the 1970s, with the likes of Ivan Illich's book,
Deschooling Society, through to more recent commentary in the early 2000s, largely inspired by the Internet and social media.
1970s In 1971,
Ivan Illich envisioned 'learning webs' as a model for people to network the learning they needed: :
I will use the words "opportunity web" for "network" to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. "Network" is often used, unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one another. I wish we had another word to designate such reticular structures for mutual access, a word less evocative of entrapment, less degraded by current usage and more suggestive of the fact that any such arrangement includes legal, organizational, and technical aspects. Not having found such a term, I will try to redeem the one which is available, using it as a synonym of "educational web." Ivan Illich, 1971 In 1977 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel wrote and published
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. In this seminal text, mostly referred to by architects, lists a "Network of Learning" as the 18th pattern, and cites Illich's earlier book as "the most penetrating analysis and proposal for an alternative framework for education." Alexander
et al. go on to advise builders and town planners interested in establishing learning networks with: :''"...work in piecemeal ways to decentralize the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals willing to take on the young as helpers, older children teaching younger children, museums, youth groups travelling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people, and so on. Conceive of all these situations as forming the backbone of the learning process; survey all these situations, describe them, and publish them as the city's "curriculum"; then let students, children, their families and neighborhoods weave together for themselves the situations that comprise their "school" paying as they go with standard vouchers, raised by community tax. Build new educational facilities in a way which extends and enriches this network."'' In the 1970s,
The Institute For The Future at
Menlo Park in California experimented with networked learning practices based on the Internet and computer conferencing. Soon after their reports were published two educational pioneers in the use of Internet technologies, Hiltz and Turoff, linked education directly with this pioneering work.
1980s In the late 1980s Dr. Charles A. Findley headed the Collaborative Networked Learning project at
Digital Equipment Corporation on the East Coast of the United States. Findley's project conducted trend analysis and developed prototypes of
collaborative learning environments, which became the basis for their further research and development of what they called Collaborative Networked Learning (CNL), and Collaborative Learning-Work (CLW).
1990s Since the development of the
Internet as a significant medium for access to information and communication, the practice of networked learning has tended to focus on its use. In the first phase of the Internet its use for networked learning was restricted by low bandwidth and the emphasis was largely on written and text based interactions between people and the text based resources they referred to. This textual form of interaction was a familiar academic medium, even though there was recognition of the unique qualities
hypertext emerging in the online form. In 1991, Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger published
Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, in which they cited numerous examples of networked learning within a wide range of settings for
informal learning and within communities of practice. In the later half of the 1990s, open, interactive, situated and networked views of learning were marginalised by educational institutions as they tended to develop or deploy content and practice through proprietary learning management systems (e.g.
Blackboard Inc,
WebCT), and collaborative work tools such as
IBM Lotus Notes/Learning Space and Quick Place), generally following concepts around "
e-learning". These systems enabled the restriction of access and the management of students for the administrative concerns of educational institutions. Since 1998, an international Networked Learning Conference has been held biannually. The conference proceedings from all the conferences since 2002 are available via the conference web site . CSALT , a research group at Lancaster University, UK, associated with the Networked Learning Conference series and several edited collections, defined networked learning as "learning in which information and communication technology is used to promote connections: between one learner and other learners, between learners and tutors; between a learning community and its learning resources". This definition seems to ignore historical use of the term however, where computing was not of central importance.
2000s In 2000,
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid released The Social Life of Information and introduced the concept of
Networks of Practice (NoP's), an informal and emergent social network that supports the sharing of information between individuals clustered around a practice. Building on the work done by
Jean Lave and
Étienne Wenger on
community of practice (CoP's), Seely Brown and Duguid argued that a network differed from a community in that the relationships among members were more informal and fluid when compared to communities. While CoP's were often localized with strong inter-personal relationships providing group cohesion, NoPs were more global with relationships that were both strong tie and weak tie relationships. Salmon (2001) wrote
"learning is built around learning communities & interaction, extending access beyond the bounds of time and space, but offering the promise of efficiency and widening access. Think of individuals as nodes on a network!" From around 2004, the idea of networked learning had a popular resurgence, corresponding with the emergence of
social media and concepts of
open source, such as is covered in
Yochai Benkler's 2006 book,
The Wealth of Networks. File:George Siemens at TEDxNYED.jpg|thumb|right|
George Siemens is a theorist on learning in a digitally based society. He is the author of the article
Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age and the book
Knowing Knowledge - an exploration of the impact of the changed context and characteristics of knowledge. In 2005,
George Siemens published a paper in the
International Journal for Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, called
Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age in which he argued the need for a new learning theory, one that captured the essence and represented the process of networked knowledge creation and learning. In 2011, the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning published the first peer reviewed collection of scholarly articles on Connectivism. This special issue was edited by George Siemens (Athabasca University and Grainne Conole (Open University, UK). In 2007, Starke-Meyerring, Duin, & Palvetzian first described Globally Networked Learning Environments (GNLE)- networked learning environments which are specifically designed to connect students from different parts of the world. GNLEs are designed to facilitate dialogue and collaboration across and within groups of students, to develop greater understanding and competencies for global work and citizenship. GNLEs take many different shapes and forms. ==Models==